Tatoo Art and Japanese Writing Script
The very first thing that you need to know about Japanese writing is that there are three writing methods you need to know and they are – Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji.
Kanji has 1945 ideograms (characters) and Kana has 92 phonetic syllabary(not including the 25 sounds added by dakuten and handukuten) that are represented with an ideogram.
The many ideograms that are learnt, to be able to read Japanese often put people off learning the scripts, but if you compare it to the complexity of the English language and the many words that are spelt differently to how they sound, the Japanese scripts are comparatively easy. The beauty of the written language is often used as an art form which we know as calligraphy!
The three scripts are formed from characters that you write with a series of strokes. There is also another script that has been adopted to aid in ease of communication between countries that use the Latin based alphabet like we do in English, and this is called ‘Romanji’.
Romanji is just Japanese words and their sounds written with Latin letters, such as A,B,C’s
Romanji makes learning Japanese alot easier when starting out because you can read the Romanji and understand the correct pronunciation before having to worry about learning all the Japanese characters.
For exmample the word for Summer is spelt ‘Natsu’, and you can of course write ‘Natsu’ using Japanese script too.
Newspapers, magazines, emails etc..all use a combination of all three writing scripts so a good understanding of all three scripts in essential.
The Kanji symbols which are commonly seen on westerners as tatoos are actually borrowed from the Chinese.
Kanji differs from the Hiragana and Katakana with the symbols that make up Kanji representing things, such as fish or chair, and the characters can have a different meaning and pronunciation in different context.
Katakana and Hiragana character are different from Kanji in that they represent syllables of words.
If you are wanting to learn to speak Japanese to go on holiday to Tokyo then you probably wont need to know how to read straight away and should focus on oral communication first, and you can take online Japanese course rather cheaply or you could learn Japanese in Tokyo by taking a crash course or trying your best to talk with locals as often as possible.
On the other hand if you sitting the Japanese Language Proficiency Test or JLPT for short, then you will need to understand the three writing scripts in more detail.
Although I have explained Japanese writing here, I do actually recommend that you learn how to speak Japanese before tackling the writing systems.
I hope that helped you understand Japanese writing. If you would like some more free Japanese lessons you may want to check out my website here:Japanese Language Course How To Learn Japanese
